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Monthly Archives: November 2017

I hope everyone enjoyed their Black Friday. I managed to avoid any stores today. I had planned to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art but instead decided my time would be better spent staying home and writing. With our World War One film in the can and the semester winding down I am now focusing on my Civil War monograph. The goal is to finish the draft by January 26, the day before the start of the Spring 2018 semester. To meet that target I have to write another 10000 words. It is definitely do-able. Today I wrote 1250. I always put the date at the top of each draft and could not help but notice that the last time I put words down was August 17. Ouch. A few people were noticing. I was gently admonished by not one but two friends at work on Wednesday about when they might expect the draft to be done. I texted a friend in the late morning to tell him I was picking up the baton once again. He asked if it was difficult getting back into it. Really it was not. I sorted my papers, got a few things in order, and once I wrote those first 50 words or so it came back.

It feels good to be back in the saddle. I’m shooting for 750 words tomorrow and another 750 on Sunday. That would mean 2500+ for the Thanksgiving weekend, which wouldn’t be too shabby.

Lt. Colonel William W. Stickney cuts the Thanksgiving cake with a Japanese sword on Guadalcanal seventy-five years ago this week. Stickney served in the Navy during World War 1. Between the wars he received his law degree. Stickney joined the Marines during World War 2 and was promoted to lieutenant colonel, commanding the 2nd Battalion, 1st Regiment, 1st Marine Division–The Old Breed–during the fighting on Guadalcanal. After the war he served several stints in the Marine Corps Reserves and eventually became a major general.

New York Times, 27 November 1942. I would love to know how this turned out. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

The powerful New York City Parks Commissioner (1934-60) Robert Moses makes a convenient foil.

Last week a friend at work brought this small blurb about World War monuments and Robert Moses to my attention. The vignette is a capsule summary of why there are so few World War Two monuments in New York City, in contrast to the significant number of memorials to the First World War. Though he does site other factors, the author in a nutshell blames Robert Moses. This led my friend and me to quip that when one wants to blame anything gone wrong in New York City, blame that once seemingly all-powerful builder and planner. Moses makes a great target; he held significant authority over huge public works projects for decades and was not afraid to use that influence. Thirty six years after his death, New Yorkers still very much live in the city and state that he gave us.

By the time Robert Moses became Parks Commissioner in 1934 New Yorkers had built hundreds of monuments large and small. Kevin C. Fitzpatrick chronicles these memorials in his recent book World War I New York: A Guide to the City’s Enduring Ties to the Great War. By the time Moses came to power the Treaty of Versailles had taken place fifteen long years previously. Gone were the romantic notions of fighting for civilization and to end war. Hitler was by now in power in Germany, and Stalin was firmly entrenched in the Soviet Union. Besides, the Depression was full on and even if people wanted to build monuments to the Great War dead there was little money to do so. When World War Two ended in 1945 Moses was adamant that there be no repeat of the cacophony of doughboy memorials we still see today in our parks. Each borough was to get one public monument. Of these, the only one actually built was the Brooklyn War Memorial in Cadman Plaza, something my students studied and wrote about last year. Whether this was good or bad depends on one’s perspective.

Moses indeed played a strong hand in all this. He had a vision for the city, state and region and wanted no obstacles that might intrude on that. Nothing would be built in his parks if he didn’t want it there. Still, the paucity of memorials was as much demographic and cultural as it was political. The soldiers, sailors and marines of 1941-45 were away much longer than the doughboys of 1917-18. When they came home they wanted to get on with their lives. There were four times more American in uniform–16 million vs 4 million–during the Second World War than in the First. They had seen killing and devastation on a scale that Americans had not witnessed in the trenches of France. Sixty million people had been killed around the world. The Second World War ushered in the Atomic Age and the Cold War. The veterans new full well it hadn’t been a “good war.” On the personal level, unlike their doughboy fathers, they had the GI Bill when they came home to attend school and get an education. Upon graduation, they had low interest loans that allowed them the opportunity to own their patch of grass in the suburbs. The question really is not why there were so few monuments built in the decade or so after the Second World War, it’s why there were any at all.

Should one happen to be in New York City this week you are invited to attend the showing of our World War One documentary. The event is being held at New York City College of Technology (CUNY), which is convenient to most public transportation. The program is being held in the Ursula C. Schwerin Library on the 4th floor of the Atrium. The event is free and runs from 1:00-2:30 pm. Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP to the email below or to me here at the Strawfoot.

A clip from the 25 June 1918 New York Times article mentioning Lieutenant Cather’s death at Cantigny. Cather served under Ted Roosevelt in the 26th Infantry Regiment.

We wrapped up the second of our two sections yesterday for the Library of America World War One module with two English classes. I will have more on that in future posts but for now wanted to share a small part of it. For the module students read excerpts from The Library of America anthology “World War I and America.” One of the readings was itself an excerpt from “Roll Call on the Prairies,” a piece that Willa Cather wrote for The Red Cross Magazine in July 1919. In my prep work for the session I learned that the novelist had a cousin who was killed in the Great War. This turned out to be one Lieutenant Grosvenor Phillips (G.P.) Cather. I did a bit more digging and it turns out that Lieutenant Cather was killed at the Battle of Cantigny on 28 May 1918.

I intend to do a deeper dive on G.P. Cather next spring on the 100th anniversary of his death. With the classes still fresh on my mind however, I wanted to share a few details about the young officer. Cather not only served in the Great War but fought in the First Infantry Division. Even wilder it turns out that Lieutenant Cather served not only in the Big Red One, but in the 26th Regiment under the command of Major Theodore (Ted) Roosevelt Jr. Major Roosevelt was gassed at Cantigny and the following month received the Silver Star for his actions there. Cather was not so fortunate and was one scores of Americans killed on the 28th of May 1918. He was posthumously award a Silver Star and Distinguished Service Cross. Lieutenant Cather was buried in France but re-interred in Nebraska in the early 1920s. His cousin never forgot him. Willa Cather used her G.P. as the inspiration for her novel One of Hours, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Again, I will have more on this next spring but for now wanted to share this brief vignette.

U.S. marines move through the streets of Hue during the Tet Offensive, 1968

I had an extraordinary experience this past Friday. I was at a local coffee shop after work when a man came in and sat down at the table next to me. I was looking at my Kindle and he asked me what I was reading. When I answer Michael Herr’s Dispatches he told me had been a marine in Vietnam. I asked what years, knowing full well that a Vietnam veteran’s period of service usually says a great deal about his experience and, more often than not, his outlook on his experience. He responded late 1967 through 1968, about fifteen months all told. I then had to ask where he was during the Tet Offensive, and he answered Hue. This was tough urban warfare. All of this led to an hour and a half conversation about not just Vietnam but current events and twentieth century history. Whether it was Mao’s Cultural Revolution or the World Wars, his thoughts were subtle and well-considered. Listening to him was humbling. His parents had come to Brooklyn from Great Britain in the late 1930s and he told me that his mother used to cry upon receiving letters from family back home during the Second World War. An uncle served under Montgomery in North Africa. At around ten in the late 1940s, he lived overseas with his family for about 7-8 months during the height of Austerity Britain. Really it was quite an extraordinary conversation.

When I mentioned that some colleagues and I are making a film about WW1 and veterans from today’s military he responded with enthusiasm. We got into a discussion about the GI Bill during which I mentioned that I have been discussing the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act with the classes with which I have been working as part of our Library of America/Gilder Lehrman grant. I go into the GI Bill with students to emphasize that the measure did not become reality until 1944 and was a direct result of the Bonus Army and the general poor treatment of World War One veterans in the 1920s and 1930s. He told me attended NYU Film School in the 1970s on the GI Bill. This was after several years of difficult readjustment in the wake of his return from Southeast Asia. This included overseeing the transport of his best friend’s remains from Vietnam to Arizona for burial. His friend was a Native American and the burial ceremony was conducted accordingly. They had promised each other that if one were killed the other would ensure the deceased’s safe passage home.

Naturally I gave him my phone number as well as the name and link to the website here. I have no doubt I will see him again. I really want to continue the conversation.

Ernest Hemingway, still a teenager, as he was upon his return to Oak Park, Illinois in late 1918 or early 1919. Note the cane. He had just spent the previous six months recuperating in a Milanese hospital from injuries incurred in Italy in July 1918. It was there that Hemingway fell in love with the nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, his muse for A Farewell to Arms and several short stories.

I am sorry for the lack of posts in recent days. With the semester in full swing things have been hectic. Enjoyable and busy. Yesterday the English professor and I wrapped up with one class the World War One module in which students watched our film and then read passages from the Library of America WW1 anthology edited by A. Scott Berg. Next week we continue and conclude in the other English 101 section. I will talk more about the readings after we totally finish. On the first day for each English section students read Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home.” Hemingway has proved to be a strong thread running through the module. It worked out neatly that the class sessions ran concurrently with the writer’s stint at the Kansas City Star in 1917-18. Students were duly impressed by Hemingway’s conviction that all he needed to know as a writer he learned from the KansasCityStar style sheet. I always stress to students the importance of keeping one’s writing as simple as possible. The irony is that the reader does not see the hard work that goes into making it look effortless. Duke Ellington often spoke about this very thing as a composer. The listener doesn’t see the effort. A student came up to me after class and said she was going to read The Star Copy Style and incorporate its ideas into her own writing. I warned that, while it still has much to offer, the writing guide was written a century ago and so is a bit dated. Still, there is still much there to go on.

Earlier in October I was doing a bibliographic session for another English class with a different instructor that was also studying Hemingway. The instructor mentioned in the class that the Hemingway scholarship used to emphasize Hemingway as a masculine figure. The drinking, boxing, womanizing, war corresponding, hunting, fishing, and the rest of it. Today it is the inverse. Hemingway scholars concentrate more on Hemingway as a vulnerable figure. The family suicides, including his own. The automobile and airplane accidents that damaged him physically. The drinking, now seen from a different perspective than half a century ago. The depression. The struggle with familial relationships. Messy divorces. And love both requited and unrequited. I came across a recent article the other day in which a doctor speculates that Hemingway may have suffered from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative brain disease increasingly found in football players due to repeated head trauma. I suppose the intellectual shift in the Hemgingway scholarship is indicative of how every generation must interpret its historical and cultural figures for its own needs and purposes.

(image/Hemingway collection, JFK Presidential Library)

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